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Malaysia’s multilingual ecology gives Mandarin a distinctive position as a community and educational language and, for some learners, an additional resource with local and transnational value. This article presents an in-depth analysis of three contrasting student accounts from a Confucius Institute (CI) in East Malaysia. The data form part of a broader qualitative interview study involving two management staff members, one Mandarin teacher, and three students; here, student accounts provide the principal evidence, while staff accounts are used only to contextualize selected classroom and institutional arrangements. The analysis identifies heterogeneous forms of investment in Mandarin, two illustrative episodes of locally situated communication, and a shared emphasis on teacher mediation. HSK-linked provision is treated as contextual institutional evidence rather than as a student theme. Because complete linguistic biographies were not systematically elicited, linguistic repertoire is used as a sensitising interpretive lens rather than as a fully mapped biographical construct. The study therefore makes a bounded contribution: it shows how Mandarin can acquire value simultaneously as a future-oriented investment and as a selectively useful local communicative resource within multilingual East Malaysia, without claiming prevalence, general cross-ethnic use, or cultural-diplomacy effects.
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